Computer Rage In Your Business? You’re Not Alone

Waiting for computers to load has become the new waiting in traffic. Oh, except waiting in traffic never went away and we’ve all already reached our limit of that. According to the figures, the average office worker loses about five days a year waiting for devices to load. That’s about $700 of value, straight down the toilet.

This miserable news was brought to us by SanDisk, a maker of SSDs and other storage devices. Their study in the UK found that business users lost about 130 hours a year to their PC loading screens in just a twelve month period. But apparently, the UK does quite well compared to some European countries. In Italy, for instance, users waited a full seven days staring into space while they waited for their PCs to load.

The effect on businesses is palpable.

Slow Computers Put Your Workers In A Rage

One of the biggest effects of all this slowness is the concomitant rage. We all know that rage accompanies computing like a bad smell. But did you know that about computer issues put about a third of users into a bad mood for the rest of the day? I thought not. But it’s true.

Things are even worse in China. Workers over there take computer delays very seriously. A full 37 percent of them find themselves experiencing deep melancholy after a computer delay. Time for some proper IT support, maybe?

Slow Computers Sap Your Productivity

Sandisk’s study also reveals just how much productivity is lost, thanks to slow computers. It’s not just the time spent staring at the screen while you wait for it to do something. It’s also the time spent waiting for applications to do what you ask them to do.

Anybody who uses an application with a large memory requirement knows what I mean here. You give a command, and then that command is carried out with a one or two-second delay. Sure, you’re not actively waiting for it to load. But because the response isn’t punchy, you can’t go as fast as you would like.

Missing DLL File, Anybody?

Do you know what a missing DLL file is? Well, if you don’t, that’s probably a good think. A dynamic-link library file stores information so that your OS can perform tasks. It sounds like something only Microsoft and Apple should care about. But, of course, these files can sometimes get lost or destroyed on your business network. And when they go missing, you soon know about it.

Having an error message flash up every time you try to save a document, for instance, could be considered annoying. So too would having an error pop up whenever you want to open your browser. Of course, you can just restore DLL files by downloading them back onto your PC. But most of the computer illiterate masses do not know this.

Random Application Misbehaviour

Topping the list of most annoying computer problems has to be random changes in application behaviour. Before you put your computer to sleep, your application was working fine.

You changed nothing, but when you started up your PC again, everything had changed. Now the application doesn’t want to play ball at all.